[Monday 07-07-08]

Today’s grinding stupidity: WaMu online CDs

It’s July 2007 and I am all about online banking. My existing CD expires, but I discover has online CDs and interest rates are at about 4.5% – which is just amazing. Bonus: No bullshit dealing with a branch.

So I drop my CD money in there and enjoy a year of blissful interest. Fast forward to July, 5 2008 – maturity day. I log on, fully expecting to be able to transfer funds out of my CD into my savings while I decide whether to go in for eight months or see if rates run up over the next few weeks.

Then I find this:

Your Online CD will renew automatically–you don’t have to do anything unless you want to change the term or amount, or close out the CD. If you do wish to make changes to your Online CD, give us a call at (800) 788-7000 during the CD’s grace period […]

So the thing that gives me great rates because it forgoes all the labor-intensive branch interference requires I go through their phone tree and deal with someone in the Phillippines to move my money around.

So I call. The first person I get tries to pitch me the idea of keeping my CD open – I explain my reasons. But, she says, there are CDs that bump their interest rate. Yeah, but those are the ones that give me 1.25% APY for 18 months, which is just lame. Your humble author can be a moron at times, but he generally does his homework.

So she transfers me to someone else.

“Hi, I’ve got an online CD that just matured and I’d like to move the funds to my savings.”

Transfer.

“Hi, I’ve got an online CD that just matured and I’d like to move the funds to my savings.”

Transfer.

“Hi, I’ve got an online CD that just matured and I’d like to move the funds to my savings.”

Transfer. At this point, I don’t care how shady they might be, a PayPal money market account or investing with the local Russia mobsters (the brothers Portnov are pretty cool guys) is looking pretty damn tempting.

Finally, someone handles my business, but I wonder how much labor and infrastructure was required for this episode that could have been handled at a branch or even – God forbid – online. I assume this system is designed to make it hard for people who hop from bank to bank after sweet deals on CDs and savings accounts, but the dedicated ones will put up with the crap anyway.

Seriously, WaMu. Seriously?

tor wrote this at 1213 : Uncategorized » Comment?
[Sunday 07-06-08]

Anatomy of a web project: Plurkbox

Being unemployed gives you lots of free time to think of stuff like this.

Plurk is my latest curiosity. It’s a microblogging service like Twitter and Tumblr – but it has a few different features. The biggest for a lot of us is that, there’s no SMS integration. But, for me, not having an API (Application Programmer Interface – the ) is probably the most annoying.

So I decided to cobble my own together.

There’s already an official unofficial Plurk API, but it can do a lot more than I need to. It’s geared more toward standalone applications and – fantastically – integrates a full suite of user controls.

I’m starting with a function to grab my “timeline” – Plurk’s term for a series of posts. I’m using a simpler set of functions are are integrated into many PHP setups called cURL to send a request to the server. Essentially, what happens is when a reader loads my page, the server talks to Plurk and pretends it’s just another browser loading up the page, and not a web server borrowing the content for its own use.

First, the impetus: I wanted to add a photo and an About Me box, and I figured that my timeline would make for a fun feature that would add value to my blog. There are, after all, so many things througout the day that I could never blog about, but would like to share with readers.

So I started with a mockup

Alright. Lookin’ ok. It’s going to be a fixed-width (250px) rounded corner box with a voice bubble motif and some identifier text. Add some PR text and we can probably call it good. It displays up one Plurk at a time, but saves the others out of the container so we can access them with some JavaScript hotness.

Right around here, I start forgetting to take pictures for a while. I’m not going to get too technical about the CSS involved in that bubble, but be assured that it will probably break in IE6.

So I got that jazz together and wrote a script that takes the somewhat nonstandard output from Plurk’s server and outputs a list. CSS has some fantastic properties. For this one, I modified the hawt Coda Panic effect with a simpler vertical progression.

Here’s a chunk of my sinfully ugly code. I’m going to make it more efficient before I deploy the item. But, for now, here’s what I’ve got. It’ll shrink quite a bit beyond this point and probably be split into three files.

And so, I leave tonight with this:

The two wee buttons at the bottom cycle through results and wrap around properly when they reach the ends of the list. I’m going to add support for expanding to show all loaded data, searching my previous plurks and some other neat plurky features.

tor wrote this at 0226 : nerdery » Tagged | 2 comments
[Thursday 07-03-08]

A perfect synthesis of man and machine to create an unstoppable fighting force

Nah, I’m just screwing with y’all. Here are some guys with sub-machine guns on Segways.

Via imagethief, there are two additional galleries of hardcore anti-terror action. Visit both for flamethrower hilarity and the sudden urge to shout “Look out! He’s got a planter!” and make gun noises.

tor wrote this at 1529 : digressions » Comment?
[Wednesday 07-02-08]

Oh brave new Losefail that hath such woodgrain in’t

So I redid my website today. Check it out and let me know what you think? Is wenge a better wood for a header than bamboo? (I couldn’t find any really good birch) Do you really hate that font? Want to know how I did that fade thing?

It might break, so let me know if it does, kthx.

Edit: I think I’m going to replace that menubar with an accordion. The fade-toggle is was neat, but I don’t think it providse enough feedback above the fold.

tor wrote this at 0053 : I'm so bored. » Tagged , | 7 comments
[Tuesday 07-01-08]

Wal-Mart errr … WalMart 2.0

Man, WalMart is so in the future right now. A vivid color element, bright ultra-modern sans? Please tell me that the wet floor effect and a Web 2.0 price stickers are next.

Since they dropped the hyphen-surrogate star from their name, can we stop writing it all stupidlike in the papers? (I’ll leave it to the comics readers to sort out the visual vocabulary of the hollow-pop symbol.)

tor wrote this at 2314 : digressions » 4 comments
[Monday 06-30-08]

Wherein we throw maturity by the wayside

Via Coke’s supercoolplacesyoushouldvisitblog on Posterous*, we get Modern Toilet.

Go ahead and let that sink in.It’s a restaurant (chain!) in Taiwan where you eat food surrounded by decor from the uh … convenience room.

That’s right. I’m back from blog silence with poop joke in tow. Follow the link for tightly coiled frozen yogurt and a link to the restaurant’s website which has a subhead that entreats “GO PEE-PEE OR GO POO-POO?”

* (Also, Posterous looks pretty neat. If they have an API, it might make a neat WordPress add-on. Sure, I signed up for pudding, but every time I want to post, it’s down – wft.)

tor wrote this at 1805 : digressions » Comment?
[Monday 06-23-08]

It’s one of those days and a bit of Schadenfreude

I’m coming up on four years owning a RAZR, and I’ve hardly had problems with them. Except for the slow-ass UI. But I’ve also babied it fairly well. I can count on one hand the times I’ve dropped my phone onto a hard surface. Why? Because I know they’re made of marzipan.

This is my second year owning my current phone. During that time of long days at work and countless weekends of drinking, I don’t think I’ve dropped it once.

Today I dropped it twice on hard surfaces, the battery popped out and everything. I fully expect the front screen to stop functioning or the SIM card to shatter, or something. But it works just fine. So has today been lucky or unlucky?

So what’s been keeping me busy today? I just started reading about the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis because … nevermind. Freakin’ Wikipedia.

Anyway, Pruitt-Igoe is absolutely fascinating. It was designed by the guy who designed the World Trade Center and the Pacific Science Center (as well as some other crap), and its unique design features backfired so fantastically, it marked the most epic fail of modern architecture and social theory.

It was described as a city of despair that made the slums it replaced look wonderful by comparison. Its demolition – a mere 20 10 years after it was constructed – was featured in Koyaanisqatsi in an eponymous sequence depicting urban decay. So if you find yourself as bored as Tor is today, go get your read going. Or, you can get ahead of the nerdery curve with the PDF of Creating Defensible Spaces.

(Also, I think I deserve props for spelling Schadenfreude correctly the first time I tried.)

Edit: One of the highlights of Creating Defensible Spaces has to be the caption on Pg. 73, which discusses “fear maps.”

tor wrote this at 1536 : I'm so bored. » 3 comments
[Tuesday 06-17-08]

AP does it wrong. Tor is not so surprised.

I’ve really been trying to avoid media-watcher posts, but I can’t help this one. I blame Kaci.

There were some grumblings recently about the AP issuing a takedown letter (boom legalshot!) to people who quote AP stories. The poster-child is parody blog The Drudge Retort, which the AP got pissy at for quoting 39 words.

What does the AP stand to lose from people quoting their stories – especially if the quoters provide a link. The AP is a non-profit funded by its members, right? So what’s the revenue they’re losing?

I’d argue that it’s in the bloggers’ best interest to link back to the original sources. Why? Bloggers like to share and they certainly want the extra exposure of perhaps being picked up by a newspapers’ blog or political wrap-up.

But what really bugs me is that the organization that is responsible for making news a commodity is now freaking out because it is being treated as such. AP headlines and video are plastered on every site. AP wire fills the A sections of metro dailies. But it’s all crap we saw on TV or read online last night and little of it is relevant to the reader. (Don’t get me started on how awful the writing can be.) This lowers reader interest in the content, which lowers advertising revenue.

Anyway, irrelevance brings us back to the AP’s fair use policy. I hope this doesn’t stand up to any serious legal challenge because it sets a bad precedent. Will people be able to revoke use of written statements if the derivative work pus them in a bad light? Can a reporter be sued over quoting an e-mail or a speech?

The AP has done enough to ruin American newspapers, let’s just hope that this is posturing. After all, they’ve had their ridiculous fee schedule up for quite a while.

My answer is as it has always been: Regional papers should form their own story-sharing groups al a OhNO and vote with their wallets when it comes to national and world news sources.

tor wrote this at 2241 : digressions » Tagged , | Comment?
[Sunday 06-15-08]

“Uh oh, we’re out of ideas for TV and movies have a lock on superheroes …”

“Got it! We’ll rehash MXC! It’s ragingly popular four years ago right now. They redubbed that crazy ’80s Japanese game show – so we can do that without the clever dubbing.”

This must have been the idea running through ABC execs’ minds when they greenlit Wipeout.

tor wrote this at 1843 : nerdery » 3 comments
[Friday 06-13-08]

Ready. Set. Journofight: Shop’d or not? A less in photo editing.

Please regard the  Photoshop Disasters (via BoingBoing, but don’t read too far down for post spoilers). Wow, so Photoshopped, right? How is that guy’s elbow in front of Tiger Woods while his face is behind the golf club. That photoer must have Lucy-Grade ‘Splainin’ to do, right? This image appeared in WaPo’s Express tab and was pounced upon by the hungry echo-chamber.

Deep in the Boing Boing comment thread, a chap from Express links the following image and this Getty gallery and the dark truth comes out. The cropping and color correction (read: blow everything the fuck out) in the Express image serves to ruin the contrast between the two subjects. Sure, it’s very subtle, but you can tell. And the cropping removes feet, which puts our perspective way out of wack. And let’s not forget that depth of field decreases as focal length increases. Notice the earlier photo with the subject more out of focus.

My judgement is that this was bad on Express for editing the photo too hard.

But here’s the rub: They really can’t spare the space on a big, beautiful photo because they’re targeting letter (or half-letter?) paper. They also run across the problem of differing output on the client side, which I guess means they have to aim for the strongest color reponse possible.

Then, of course, the question: Is editing for the clientside an ethics issue?

tor wrote this at 0044 : digressions » Comment?